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Hi!

I run a small custom software company in Michigan.

I want to get better at outbound sales beyond just cold emailing or messaging people through LinkedIn.

We’re about to start publishing case studies and doing some outreach, so I want to take some time to study outbound sales and improve my skills.

Any recommended courses, books, or frameworks for B2B outbound sales, consultative selling, or building effective outreach pipelines?

Thanks!

I have rated hundreds of books in Goodreads and it still gives me crummy recommendations. For example, other books by the same author, or just books in the same genre with high ratings. Always the same collection of classics or things I can easily find myself. I would much rather have a service which sees a pattern in books I have rated highly in the past and surprises me with books it thinks I will like. Does anyone know of an actually good recommendation service? Surely this must be possible with today's AI capabilities.

I mostly read newspapers and technical journals, but two books that I read that made an impression: "The Changing World Order" and "The Gulag Archipelago".

Thread for 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509408

Thread for 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782613

Thread for 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873800

Here are mine:

Technical skills:

- Among my last year's goals was to take on VR dev, which sadly I did not get to. Punting it to 2026. I'm thinking to get the Samsung Galaxy XR and experiment with some VR apps and learn the fundamentals of spatial computing. As an Android mobile developer, that feels like a natural extension.

- Complete the "UCSanDiegoX: Computer Graphics II: Rendering" computer graphics course. I did the first course in the series and found it enlightening (no pun intended)

- Create an e2e project that earns money as a side gig. It's time to put my product and technical knowledge to practice and actually build something people want.

- Leverage AI across all my endeavors. AI tools are here to stay and the more I know how to use them effectively, the better. The speed boost in learning a new framework/concept is phenomenal.

Non-technical skills:

- Expand my social circle - the unstable tech climate made me realize the importance of maintaining a healthy social network. My goal is to connect with more people both inside my company and outside, by both proactively reaching out and going to meetups in my area. In fact, I invite fellow NYC-based HN-ers to contact me at cybercreampuff at yahoo dot com, in case you want to meet up!

Hi, I built a small tool that I have used daily for a long time. A few friends and classmates also use it and they keep telling me it is genuinely useful. But I am stuck on distribution. I am a student, I have no budget for ads, and I am not good at marketing (i try but i'm super bad). When I mention it in other communities it often gets treated as self promotion and I get blocked.

If you were starting from zero today, how would you get the first 100 real users in a clean way? I would love specific ideas like where to share, what kind of write up works, how to approach niche communities, or what you would build into the product to make sharing natural.

Thanks.

Hi HN,

I’m not trying to build a unicorn or a scalable SaaS.

I’m offering a highly personalized, manual service priced at $49. My goal is very specific and limited:

Get exactly 200 paying customers. Not 2,000. Not VC-scale. Just 200.

Once I hit that, I’m happy.

Given this constraint: • What distribution channels make the most sense when volume is small but personalization is high? • Would you bias toward 1:1 outreach, niche communities, or something else entirely? • If you were optimizing for speed to first 200 sales, what would you avoid doing?

I’m intentionally keeping the scope small and realistic and would love advice from people who’ve done similar “small but profitable” launches.

Thanks — and happy to share results back.

A time for family, or avoiding family, depending on the family. ;-)

Google Search change in a way that I can’t seem to opt out of.

I’m based in a non-English-speaking country, but I regularly search in English, especially for technical topics.

My Google account, my laptop, my phone, my interface language, and preferences are all set to English; only my physical location and payment methods are local.

What happens is that Google increasingly returns localized results in my native language and aggressively applies automatic translation.

Some concrete behaviors I’m seeing:

- Queries written in English still prioritize pages in Portuguese, even when equivalent English sources exist.

- Reddit results are often force-translated instead of linking to the original English content.

- “AI mode” responses are always in Portuguese, even when the prompt is clearly in English, with no visible way to force output language.

- The UI offers a choice between “Portuguese” and “All web,” but selecting “All web” doesn’t reliably return English results nor disable translation.

- In practice, explicit query language seems to be overridden by inferred user preferences (location / account language).

I’m curious whether others are seeing the same behavior, and whether there’s any way to restore search to become 100% useful again; or what are you using since this really limits search results, especially for technical things.

Different cultures celebrate Christmas at different days and time zones are a thing. But it's Christmas here, so:

Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope you get some rest and can spend time with people who are dear to you and get to focus on what's important rather than getting lost in stressing about everything having to be perfect.

Also much love to everyone who cannot spend their Christmas with dear people.

To make sure this post meets the relevancy criteria, here is a Wikipedia article about some Christmas (more precisely advent) tradition which I personally really like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_market

I've seen people rely on built-in sandboxes, use git worktrees (sometimes inside devcontainers), or run the whole agent inside a Linux VM with minimal host mounts. On Linux, I’ve also seen firejail/bubblewrap mentioned.

For folks actually using these tools day-to-day:

What’s your default setup?

Have you had any "learned the hard way" moments?

What tradeoff (safety vs convenience vs parallelism) has mattered most in practice?

I'm less interested in theoretical best practices than what's actually holding up under real use.

The Rest is Politics, Leading, Philosophize This and Stratechery (paid) are the podcasts that stood out the most in 2025. Curious what other HNers listen to.

I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations.

Specifically interested in posts that: 1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely 2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures 3. Are well-structured and readable 4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes

Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?

I have been doing software for a living for the past 10 years or so.

I can call myself an average senior engineer. Cannot really pass the DSA rounds at Tier 1/Tier 2.

Somehow was able to keep the jobs I had so far via pure bruteforce and hard work.

These days I am pair programming with AI to write a lot of code. Probably checking in about 10 to 15k lines of code per month on average. I know it may not be a good metric, but if I compare myself to an earlier verision of me, that person would be checking in a 2 or 3 k lines of code at best per month.

I can get the work done, probably can do a bit of good judgement when AI writes sloppy code.

But, I am not sure till when these skills will be relevant

Like what if that judgement is not needed anymore, like 2-3 years down the line?

Is anyone else in the same boat? How are you dealing with this?

File from https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%201.zip

1251.06mb, Hash 6d23adffac9736b8e46fd195b64000cb

https://web.archive.org/web/20251219213848if_/https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%201.zip

1261.36mb, Hash c54a12403fbb352113aa544934b5d156

What has changed?

We talk a lot about shipping features, but I want to hear the war stories.

I spent almost a month chasing a silent data corruption issue that turned out to be floating-point non-determinism between x86 and ARM chips. It completely changed how I look at "reliable" memory.

What was your "white whale" bug of the year?

It seems there are many solutions for social media these days, but only one LinkedIn. Why are we still putting up with it? I’m surprised there’s not been a contender yet, or maybe I am not aware and perhaps that could be the rub; the challenge of acquiring enough traffic for the network effect to take hold.

And what IT issue will you (probably) fix today?

Built a tool for founders and eng managers who want visibility without checking GitHub every day. It connects to your repos, tracks commits and PRs automatically, and sends weekly summaries to Slack or email. Also works as a Slack bot - ask it "what shipped last week" or "what's stuck in review" right from your workspace. https://gitmore.io (free for 1 repo) Would this actually save you time?

I recently revisited an HN discussion on using “Postgres for everything” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42347606 ) and also read/participated in this Twitter thread: https://x.com/BenjDicken/status/2002742633966514544 . Both prompted a few reflections. What stood out to me was how divided opinions still are—some people strongly believe in this approach, while others don’t. I wanted to share my perspective on this.

In my experience, many proponents of “Postgres for everything” haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create. I was firmly in that camp for nearly a decade while working at Citus and on the Microsoft Postgres team. After building PeerDB (a Postgres CDC product that syncs data to various systems) and working at ClickHouse, my perspective completely changed. Seeing firsthand the “magic” that purpose-built systems deliver for their specific use cases—especially in terms of cost, performance, and scale—was truly eye-opening.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a huge Postgres proponent and have spent 10 years helping customers implement it. However, I strongly believe in using Postgres for what it was designed for in the first place. Postgres is a row-based OLTP database, with over 30 years of engineering effort dedicated to making it robust for that specific workload.

Proponents of “Postgres for everything” often argue that a single stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s frequently overlooked, however, is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work well for use cases it wasn’t designed for. At Citus, many customers had reasonably sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was to constantly tune, operate, and “babysit” the system to keep it working at scale.

Separately, we’re seeing the need for purpose-built technologies emerge much earlier in a company’s lifecycle, likely driven by AI. At ClickHouse, many customers using Postgres CDC are seed-stage companies that have grown rapidly. We pulled together some data that highlights these trends here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-cdc-year-in-review-2025#use-cases

Ultimately, I believe it’s better to make it seamless and even magical for users to integrate purpose-built technologies with Postgres, rather than making an overgeneralized claim of “Postgres for everything.”

I saw a Sudoku game the other day-SUDOKU you know a few numbers-that took 40 seconds to load, and then caused the phone to overheat while in play, while splashing ads here and there. Its sad. That was the very definition to me of "giving into bloat". Nobody cares about efficiency anymore, and in fact are going in the opposite direction. Substituting bloat for actual programming knowledge, many of these game developers never touched a single ounce of code nor would know how to begin with. Just downloaded some bloaty API and pump out games on an engine that requires 4TB to run (so basically it means spoiled brats are using it) I have given up on computer science which I used to love so much. Anymore its just...disappointing how the world adapted to it. very...very disappointing. All that potential yet it is all wasted on bloat, redundant security and moneygrubbing before the first pixel is ever drawn.

If you have fond memories of misspending entirely too much of your youth on web-based message boards, or you would like to misspend more of your nights and weekends on them now, Google has you covered. Simply add

  inurl:viewtopic.php

  inurl:"index.php?topic="

  inurl:showthread.php

  croissant AND (inurl:viewtopic.php OR inurl:showthread.php OR inurl:"index.php?topic=")

HN puts the Christmas banner and alternating colors. I am curious what percentage of HN community celebrates Christmas vs. not at all, another religion, or born Christian but doesn't celebrate etc.

Note: When I was in college (years ago) I asked an admin this and he said point blank 'face it it's a Christian world'

Dear all,

do we have an statistics on visitor location/country here?

Would be curious: Is it US-centered? How much people from LatAm or SEA? EU?

Maybe there was a question like this in the past, but I couldnt find it.

(Maybe this is a question for @dang?)

Hey all, didn't want to pay for Strong or Hevy so I started building my own lifts journal app.

It's free and always will be.

https://stronk.app

Source Code (open to contributions). If you find bugs, add it to the issues. If you don't use it now but plan to after I build out the features, please star the project so I know to keep working on it.

https://github.com/alshdavid/stronk

There a lot to do still, gotta add things like;

- Strava/Facebook Sync

- Import/Export

- Charts

- Set type (warmup/drop)

- Timers

- Online backups (right now it's saved to your phone)

- Programmable custom routines using JavaScript (like 5-3-1, progressive overload)

- A suite of default routines

It's a web app because I'm not paying Apple and Google to publish it on the app store.

Most large social networks rely on advertising and data collection, which pushes them toward algorithms, engagement optimization, and scale at all costs.

I keep seeing complaints about this, but usage rarely changes. A lot of past attempts at “better” social networks seem to stall despite good intentions.

I am curious how people here think about this:

Would a small, paid social network focused on existing relationships have any realistic chance of adoption, or do network effects and user behavior make this fundamentally unworkable?

If you think it fails, what tends to be the real blocker: pricing, lack of novelty, switching costs, or something else?

I am looking for reasons this does not work, not encouragement.

I downloaded it and compiled it and ran some toy programs. I have no idea how to use it for an actual project even though I have a stack of dusty rpi's and esp32s in the drawer.

Any one want to share their inspiration?

I’m looking for ideas to build and open-source.

Curious what problems you expect to matter in the next couple of years.

Thx!

Today is the worst day of my life. We live in a country near Cambodia, and as you know, it is kind of a dream land for scammers. Today, it happened to my family.

My mother received a call from a scammer. They told her she needed to process some tax issue and prove that her bank account had enough money. In just a few minutes, they tricked her and manipulated her into entering banking OTP codes. All of her savings are now gone.

What makes this more dramatic is that last year I architected and helped a government department in my country build a big system. This system can track money flows across the whole country, to know where money comes from. I was very proud of this. It is the biggest achievement of my life. Even if nobody knows I built it, that was fine.

But now I cannot protect my own mother. I cannot protect my family. My system can track the money, but it is almost impossible to get it back.

When I went to the police, just in one small area, there were more than 20 cases in a single day. A hardworking student sent all their family's money, thinking it was for university fees or going abroad. An old factory worker lost all her retirement savings. So many people lost everything. That is when I realized that the system I built, the system I was proud of, is not enough.

All my own savings are gone too. (My mother was scammed into borrowing a lot of money and sending it to the scammers, and now it is my responsibility.) I had plans for the next few years: to do open source work, to write books about math and programming, to create a dream Go web framework, to give back to the community. Now all of that is gone.

But this is not only about me. I can still start over. I am strong enough to rebuild my life. But who will protect people like my mother? Or a poor student? Or a factory worker? Or so many others?

I can build systems. I can build distributed systems that scale to a whole country. But for what? What should I do?

I have been reading Hacker News for 12 to 13 years, sometimes posting from other accounts. I am writing here now to ask for advice and help from this community.

If anyone has experience with similar cases, or ideas on what can realistically be done, or even advice on how to move forward after something like this, I would really appreciate it. I will keep this account semi-private, because with the details above, I think some engineers from my country may recognize me.

I'm preparing to open source some code I have and I explicitly do not want it used to train AI in any fashion. Is there an open source license that prohibits this?

Dear HN,

I’m a solo operator with no paying customers yet. I wanted more predictable baseline costs while iterating on a side project, so I migrated from App Engine to Cloud Run.

I fed my setup, budget, and constraints as context into Gemini CLI, asked it to search official documentation and best practices, and followed that guidance.

I removed –min-instances=1, expecting autoscaling to reduce idle spend. The commit message claimed “60% cost savings.” The actual outcome was roughly an 1,800% increase and a surprise decline message when I went to buy coffee on my credit card.

From Nov 2 to Dec 14, Cloud Run accrued ~$4,676. There was no traffic spike, no abuse, no application bug. The services were mostly idle.

What compounded: CPU and memory were over-provisioned (4 CPU, 16Gi) from earlier experimentation. Each deploy created a new revision, and I deployed frequently while iterating. Those revisions must have stayed warm longer than expected. Autoscaling plus revision sprawl meant more active resources than intuition suggested, even without traffic.

The billing alert failure: I had alerts enabled at $50. I received one early notification, then silence as spend climbed another $4,600. There were no clear signals that my cost profile had materially changed.

I contacted Google Cloud Billing Support looking for clear guidance or partial relief. After review, they declined any adjustment and closed the case. As a solo dev without an account team, there was no escalation path beyond accepting the charges.

Where it stands now: After right-sizing resources and cleaning up revision sprawl, daily costs dropped from ~$200 to under $5 on my billing dashboard. I’m cautiously optimistic but not certain it’s fully resolved.

For those running Cloud Run longer term: How do you actually cap downside as a solo dev? Do you set hard budget caps and accept downtime? Are there deployment patterns that avoid revision sprawl? Is App Engine still preferable purely for cost predictability? What guardrails work that don’t depend on constant manual billing checks?

I wasn’t chasing scale. I was trying to be careful with money while building alone. I’d appreciate hearing what others would do differently.